One of Britain's favourite broadcasters speaks up about growing old, being an
icon of the Sixties and making the world a better place - and why she
intends to waste neither her time nor her fortune

Joan Bakewell is in a feisty mood. “People don’t want the problem of the elderly,” says the 79-year-old baroness. “Everyone would be pleased if the old just went away. Except perhaps their own granny. She can stay … as long as she shuts up, then leaves them lots of money!”

She laughs, because there is no danger of this granny shutting up. The broadcaster, author and journalist has settled into the House of Lords just in time to fight the Coalition’s plans to abolish peers like her. “It needs reform, but not this reform.”

As the former official Voice of the Older Person under Gordon Brown, she will also speak up about the apparently imminent Bill on care of the elderly. “We’re knee deep in reports. We need action!”

And just to underline this defiance, she has no intention of leaving lots of money to her family. “Well, they’ll get something. All these books, for a start.” The walls of her Victorian town house are piled high with volumes. “They’ll go straight in the bin, I imagine. I will leave my daughter a bracelet. But as for the rest of it, I said to them, ‘I’m spending it now, is that OK?’ They said, ‘Fine.’ You live in the present.”

Her son, daughter and six grandchildren have had some nice family holidays out of granny’s desire to spend their inheritance, but “the rest”, as she puts it, is hefty. Baroness Bakewell of Stockport lives in a beautiful home in a secluded part of Primrose Hill, an area of London literally rich with pop stars, actors and celebrity chefs. She bought the house for £12,000 in the early Sixties and it is now worth about £4 million. Why not pass some of that on to the kids? She thinks the notion is odd.

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“People care very much about being able to leave a slug of money to their children. I think it’s really weird. The idea of some people getting massive legacies by accident of birth while others do not is very divisive. It sets up a schism. The rich leave their children money, while the poor stay poor.” She pauses, caught in a moment of self-awareness. “That sounds very high-minded, doesn’t it?”

Yes, but she made her name in the 1960s as a young, chic and sexily clever television presenter, interviewing the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen. She has tackled some of the great questions of our age on programmes such as Heart of the Matter. Cool, calm and always perfectly spoken as a result of elocution lessons in her youth, she is at home discussing politics, religion, ethics and the arts. She is allowed to sound high minded, she is Joan Bakewell. “For God’s sake, don’t talk like that,” she laughs. “Dreadful. Oh God. Listen, I don’t want to abolish the rich and hand over all the money to the poor. I just think we should be less divided.”

Lady Bakewell has become more outspoken as she has got older, and more willing to be the story rather than just tell it. She was Labour’s “old people’s tsar” for only 18 months but pensioners still write in great numbers, asking her to speak up for them. And she is not afraid to say when one of her contemporaries is talking tosh. Take John Simpson, the BBC world affairs editor, who announced in typically grand style last week that he would end his own life rather than let his six-year-old son remember him as “a gibbering, sad old wreck”.

She is lightly dismissive, at first. “He’s a youngster, isn’t he? In his Sixties?” Then she takes him apart. “It sounds easily said. We all feel we would like to be in charge of our own going. We don’t want to be kept alive on machinery for the sake of scientific experiment, or for the egos of the doctors. His idea that he’s going to collect all the pills and knock them back at the right moment is slightly journalistic. It’s not as easy as that.”

Is this something she has contemplated? “I know people who are saying, quietly: ‘How do you do it? If you wanted to make sure, where would you go? Do you know which tablets?’ Those are the conversations that people have when they get older.” But then there is the issue of timing. “I admire John’s wish to be in control, but I’m not sure at what point you would say, ‘Tomorrow, I’ll go.’ I’m not sure you want to, when the time comes. People with dementia can have a good quality of life.”

She adds: “I felt it was a rather male, journalistic statement, by someone who is still in the field, still doing a job, who is thoroughly healthy and who feels he’ll know what it will be like when he’s ailing. He doesn’t.”

She is not making her own preparations then? “I’m not stockpiling drugs, no.”

She’s probably too busy. After this, Lady Bakewell plans to get her teeth into the proposal for an elected senate to replace the House of Lords. “It is too big, there are about 300 people who don’t bother to come at all. But we don’t want to lose the thoughtfulness and expertise of the House. There have been incremental reforms over the last century and that is right. This slam-bam approach is the wrong way to go.”

Then there is the Bill on care of the elderly. “You should be able to buy a package which pays for your care, on the understanding that it will come out of your estate when you die. People are outraged by the idea that they should have to sell their house to pay for care, but that is a hard argument to hold up. You store up your savings, including your house, for a rainy day. Being old and in need of care is a rainy day.” Lady Bakewell is also appearing at the Telegraph Ways With Words Festival in Devon next week to talk about a novel she has written called She’s Leaving Home. It tells the story of a young woman who escapes a strict upbringing in northern England in the 1950s and comes to London as things begin to swing. “There is a common experience there, but it is also a fantasy of what my teenage years might have been like,” she says. “I just studied hard and went to university.”

She read economics and history at Cambridge and met her first husband Michael Bakewell. They moved into this house together. “We could afford it nearly 50 years ago because the place was very run down. Euston is close by, and in those days of steam trains the areas around railway stations were always grim. We wanted high ceilings and big windows. As long as I can afford it I will stay here. As long as I can manage the stairs.” From the look of her, elegant in a white cotton dress and blue blazer, that will be a while. It’s still obvious why Frank Muir, a man of his time, casually gave her an epithet in the 1960s that has stuck all these years: “The thinking man’s crumpet.” Those were the days when she was having a passionate secret affair with the playwright Harold Pinter, which became his play Betrayal. I start to ask what would happen if a young presenter at the BBC was called the same thing now, and she breaks in: “It would end in court.” But that’s not true. It would quickly be turned into a TV show and a slogan on a T-shirt, or even a pack of teatime treats. The Thinking Man’s Crumpets. “Yes, I can see that. It’s Katie Price’s world, isn’t it?” She was always said to detest the epithet but it turns out that is not entirely the case. “Half my women friends were outraged. I sided with them when I was with them. But then the other half said, ‘You’re bloody lucky. What a wonderful brand. I wish someone had called me that.’” She was in two minds then? “Women were divided over it and so was I. That is what it is like for women now. They want to be sexy and wear these crazy high heels and low-cut dresses, and yet if someone responds to this display they end up in court.”

Impatient with this line of questioning, she flashes a look at her watch. “So many of these things don’t seem to matter when you get older. I don’t care any more.” The House of Lords is calling. She wants to get on with more important things, and quite right too. This granny won’t be sidetracked, let alone silenced. “I’m a great one for saying to people, ‘Don’t waste time. Do what you want to do now, or it will be too late.’”